Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life, explores the intersection between photography and loneliness. Pair with Angela Qian’s review of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City.
Lonely Subjects
Why?
Jesse Eisenberg’s nephew has a few questions for him in The New Yorker. Listen to Eisenberg read a piece of his new book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, and face existential doubt in Shouts and Murmurs.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Zhang; Perrotta; Binet; Senna; Gurnah; Lish
Out this week: Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang; Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta; The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet; New People by Danzy Senna; Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah; and White Plains by Gordon Lish. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
U.S. History Textbooks or J.K. Rowling’s Magic
Over at Indian Country Today Media Network, read a statement in response to the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America. “What matters here, folks, in this debate over J.K. Rowling’s latest work is the language society uses – the language that is still taught to kids in schools today about Native Americans and our spiritualities.”
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Pirouettes
We’ve covered the Atlantic series By Heart a number of times before. It features notable authors writing about their favorite passages. In the latest edition, Mary-Beth Hughes picks out a paragraph from Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, about a poet who’s trying to cope with grief. Sample quote: “Reading Fitzgerald, I felt it was possible to write as I’d experienced dancing.”
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Seeing Van Gogh
“‘What pleases the PUBLIC is always what’s most banal,’ he wrote to his brother in 1883. But nowadays Van Gogh pleases the public enormously. So has he become banal?” Julian Barnes reflects on Van Gogh’s life and work and how our perception of him has changed over time in a London Review of Books podcast. Interested in contemporary art? Check out our own Bill Morris’s piece on the Whitney Museum.
McGregor Adapting American Pastoral
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Ewan McGregor will direct and star in an upcoming version of American Pastoral.